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Comment by heywire | Hacker News Reader

When my office closed about 5 years ago, there was a Brother HL-4150CDN on the trash pile. Apparently the warning to replace the drum was enough to deem it not worthy of being shipped back to headquarters. I took it home, reset the drum life counter, and continue to use it to this day. I’ve replaced the toner once. It has been telling me that the belt life is almost up, but I’ll probably just reset that counter too. The only downside is that it is an older Ethernet/USB model with no support for AirPrint. However, a Pi Zero W attached to the back with Velcro, running CUPS and an AirPrint daemon, solves that issue.

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For pretty much all the older USB-only printers, using something like a Pi (supply being the current limiting factor) is the solution to networking it. It is not that different than the "print server" built into the network-enabled models.

Bonus points for being able to update the print server SW to something NOT naked and stupid on the network.

As a downside, the trick of changing the "Ready" message on the HP printer's LCD panel by playing fun games with HPPJL isn't possible, either. Hrm. Maybe an idea - bundled Pi print servers with an LCD? Wonder if anyone makes such kits?

you can pick up cheap network printer adapters , skip the Pi, plug and play.

Fair, though not all printers can accept a NIC. And, we are also back to our of date NIC FW.

Those warnings and replacement schedules are calibrated for heavy use in a mission-critical office environment, where people are printing dozens to hundreds of pages an hour (depending on the specific model) all day, every day; and where any printer failure costs many thousands of dollars in direct and opportunity costs.

In a residential office with orders of magnitude less use, and very low costs for an unexpected failure, it'll probably work fine for many years.

tl;dr Used office-grade laser printers are often a great bargain for home use.

It’s probably better having the networking connected to an external device you can keep updated anyway.

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